Fallout 4’s settlement building is a great way to pass your time in the Wasteland. Creating a stylish base for all manner of travelers to come and set up camp not only allows you to show off your creative flair, but can also harbor some fruitful rewards if you do it right.
One of the prerequisites of obtaining these rewards from your settlement is to increase the overall happiness. There are a number of ways you can do this and we’re here to help guide you to a settlement full of beaming smiles.
Check the Basics
Whether you’re at your settlement or on one of the long, dusty trails of the wasteland, you can always check how your settlements are getting along. The very first thing to achieve settlement happiness should always be to ensure that food and water are a plenty.
If you’re not ticking these two boxes, it makes your settlers a lot more difficult to be happy. Can you blame them? They have no food or water! In order to combat this, plant plenty of crops and build some water pumps in order to get the basics in place. Once you’ve got these down, your happiness should generally increase quite a bit. From here on out, it’s all down to a couple of neat tricks.
Oh, and don’t forget to assign workers to keep the food coming.
Accommodation
If you hope to keep the residents of your settlement happy and ensure they stick to doing their job, you must provide a bed for each one of them. You can assign each settler to a specific bed, but they will tend to find their way to a bed automatically when it becomes time for them to sleep. One way in which you can definitely increase settler happiness with beds is to make sure they’re indoors. As nice as it is to look up at the stars at night in the wasteland, putting a roof over their heads increases a settlers happiness even more.
Build Solid Defenses
If you’re seeing the hazard triangle next to the defense stat on your Pip-Boy or at the top of your screen when in workshop mode, you may have discovered the cause of your happiness problems. A high defense rating makes your settlement a lot less liable to a raider invasion and so will make your settlement’s inhabitants feel a lot more at ease.
Build some turrets and connect them to generators or build some guard posts and assign one of your settlers to man both of them. A single guard can man up to three posts and can, therefore, boost your defense rating by 6. Keeping settlers feeling comfortable and safe in your base will contribute greatly to increasing your happiness rating.
Set Up Stores
As you’re scrolling through the workshop menu in your settlement, you will have the option to build stores. Crafting stores such as a clinic, general trader, food and drink shop, and a clothes store will greatly boost the happiness of your settlement.
For these to actually have any effect on your settlement, you must assign a worker to a store. Once you do, a worker will always remain at that store during the opening times of the store. While these are a great way to build your settlement happiness, placing one of your settlers on the stores will give you a constant trickle of caps too. However, to be able to get build these stores in your settlement you must have both ranks of the Local Leader perk. Some stores, such as the Surgery Center also require additional perks such as Medic.
Buy a Dog
Yes, this can actually be done. You’ll come across a seller who will visit your settlement and will have a dog for sale. You can buy him and you most definitely should regardless of the cost. The seller may seem a bit reluctant but as long as he is reassured the dog will be well looked after, you’ll have a new furry friend for your settlement.
Just having the dog around will boost the happiness stat of your settlement but it will also increase the overall defense rating of that settlement by five. Make sure you purchase this when the opportunity arises.
Be a Proactive Leader
In order for your settlement happiness to reach the very highest levels, you must always be checking on them and being a proactive leader. With the help of your trusty Pip-Boy, you can check for updates and alerts about the settlement you control. If you hear on Radio Freedom that one of your settlements is facing an attack from some pesky Raiders, fast travel or make your way on foot back there. Help defend the settlement from the attack and your settlers will be happy that you returned to save the day.
On occasion, inhabitants of your settlement may also ask for you to go out and do a quest for them too. These are another great way to increase your settlement’s happiness rating and will have you moving that meter up to 100 in no time.
And there you have it, our top tips for reaching the very peak of happiness. Have you got any special tricks for keeping your settlement happy in Fallout 4? Are you enjoying the game’s settlement crafting system? Let us know in the comments below.
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